You know you have a popular website when it becomes the target of spammers and ill-doers but that’s just one of the drawbacks of running a successful website.
If you’ve recently noticed an influx of new users to your PHP Melody video website, please take a closer look at their details. Users using strange email addresses and from seemingly random countries, as well as other random user details indicate the possibility of spam users.
This issue affects older PHP Melody versions (i.e. before v2) and a fix for those is not available. All things considered, it’s a good time to upgrade your PHP Melody v1.x to v2.x and secure it against such issues. The good news is that they are pretty much harmless if caught early. Here are a few options we recommend for hardening PHP Melody’s registration page against spam bots.
Option 1: Activate reCaptcha and change the ‘account activation’ method
Simply log into your back-end and browse to the ‘User settings’ tab from the ‘Settings’ page. Scroll down to ‘Registration Settings’ and select reCaptcha as your default captcha method. You need to provide a reCaptcha key which you can get in minutes and it’s 100% free.
Since you’re on the ‘Registration Settings’ page, you might just as well take a look at the ‘Account Activation’ method. If it’s currently set to ‘none’, change it to ‘User Email’.
Option 2: Apply Trace’s patch from the forums
This patch is freely available for download to all ‘verified’ forum users. You might not have a forum account but you can easily get one and have it verified. Should take less that 5 minutes.
Option 3: Do both
To get the best results, apply the first two options at the same time.